Syria neoliberal invasion ad campaign casts chicks with guns but no helmets


THAT’S RICH. When they’re not bombarding western viewers with contrived photo-ops of camera-facing toddlers, victimized by Asad’s bombs never ours, the neoliberal propagandists are fishing for left-leaning sympathies with “Freedom Fighters” who Americans could not should not leave behind. Meet the West’s own Femen ForWar, Kurdish anarchist insurgents, one even dubbed “Angelina Jolie”, who are photographed in action, with wide smiles in sniper’s nests, looking like they’re otherwise hanging in homeroom detention. I’m surprised we never see the lighting crews or makeup artists reflected in the shattered glass, but what we don’t see in plain sight are HELMETS. Apparently only real soldiers need those.

There’s even a Chicks-with-Guns meme gone viral of a bareheaded Freedom Fighter breaking into a huge grin after narrowly escaping a sniper’s bullet. One man’s insurgent is another man’s freedom fighter. Western media’s freedom fighters are your Freedom Fries.

Why should you attend the Denver Nalty-Byfield ENTERPRISE TRIAL?

Why support the “We The People” public-oath sticklers who the state is prosecuting like a criminal enterprise? A few reasons: Solidarity. Because as hardheaded as they might be, defendants Stephen Nalty and Steve Byfield are still JUDICIAL REFORM ACTIVISTS. Sense of fair play. Half the courtroom gallery is filled with Colorado Attorney General staffers and FBI special agents chumming it up with jurors and briefing their THREE FBI UNDERCOVER WITNESSES while the defendant pariah side of the audience is warned by the judge that even a whisper will result in ejection. Thrills. Where else are you going to see this many federal agents pushing their weight around, barking at you in the hallways, swaggering gleefully about how much smarter they are than the defendants? Pathos. Come watch the Assistant Fucking Colorado Attorney General, Robert Shapiro himself, lead a team of prosecutors against the unrepresented defendants, watch Shapiro belittle them, lecture them, trivialize their difficulties defending themselves in jail, and pretend they can review “tens of thousands” of pages of evidence and “hours and hours” of undercover surveillance tapes in a single day. Because you can make a difference. Come push the FBI-guys’ buttons. Come witness and document the abuses of the overbearing prosecution team. Come lend public pressure on the judge, whose conscience is already bothering him about how unfair this sham trial has become.

Liens
You don’t have to agree with how Nalty and Byfield went about trying to reform the judicial system, but aren’t they mostly right? Judges ARE corrupt. Local officials ARE NOT accountable to the people. Law enforcement WON’T pursue charges of their own corruption and the media certainly won’t side with the reformers. When Nalty, Byfield and Co, served commercial liens valued at billions and trillions of dollar against officials who hadn’t filed oaths of office, it was an effort of last resort to get someone’s attention. No one was thinking, hey, maybe this eleven-figure dollar demand will slip through the cracks and the billions will be ours!

Each lien was calculated to represent the sum defrauded from and owed to the American People. Prosecutors can tap these defendants for conspiring and racketeering and extorting and attempting to influence public officials, but they can’t say the defendants aimed to obscond with one single penny. Throwing three undercover infiltrators at a twenty member judicial reform group, putting thousands of manpower hours into locking these defendants away, is gross abuse of authority and it’s hubris.

Authentic transgressions
As the sham trial goes on, the pieces are coming together on the cases of Nalty and crew. It turns out federal investigators labeled them “sovereigns” because they’ve held themselves not responsible for paying traffic tickets, property taxes, and the like. In the end I’ll grant you Nalty’s group may be guilty of those. I say “may” because such citations may have been retaliatory for their political beliefs.

As to the punishment, I believe adjudicators should take into account that the defendants acted not to enrich themselves, nor to flaunt the law per se, but to assert political rights about which they may have been misguided. Again I say may because the defendants are being tried, after all, according to a set of laws, which enforce a social contract, the terms of which the parties do not agree.

I use the word misguided as a nod to those who think the Nalty gang have acted like idiots. That’s easy to say, and easy to laugh, but no one’s yet figured out how to emancipate labor from the yoke of capital. You may regard interest and rent as your inherent debts. These sovereigns don’t and they’re trying to say so.

Economic slavery
Ours is a system of peonage to which this crew feels they never indentured themselves. The ersatz writs and liens they spammed to every official they encountered were the legal loopholes they thought could break the bank and liberate everyone from financial tyranny. While Nalty’s scheme intended insurrection, it wasn’t against democracy or the republic, it was against taxation without representation, the same beast Americans pretend to have overthrown with the Declaration of Independance.

Instead of tea into Boston Harbor, this crew dumped a bunch of junk paper unto the reception counters of Colorado public offices. Charge Nalty’s crew with littering maybe, at most, vandalism, though it’s hard to say these vandals caused even a scratch. Every public official who testified as a victim said they didn’t take the ersatz documents seriously.

The writs and liens looked officious, but weren’t attributed to known government or banking institutions. Likewise signatures were signed in red. Red was chosen to represent the signer’s blood, even though red is a color which automated banking systems reject as unreadable, therefore invalid.

Not one witness expressed confusion about the validity of the papers. They mentioned too the rambling diatribes in the text block.

To call the defendants “paper terrorists” wildly overstates the effect they achieved. They didn’t terrorize anyone. Governments like to accuse rebellious insurgents of “terrorism”, but that’s another paralegal threshold with which most common citizens, and certainly these “sovereigns”, disagree.

Real funny money
These guys did the equivalent of feed Monopoly Money into ATMs. No bank balances were changed and no real money came out. Counterfeit currency is one thing, but denominations of your own handywork pretending to be only that does not qualify as funny money in the illegal sense. I’m guessing forms submitted in a language foreign to bank clerks would be rejected out of hand. How are these any different? Irregular submissions, as one witness called them, need not generate calls to the FBI or the Colorado Joint Terrorism Task Force. I’ll bet that ATMs know to reject Monopoly Money. If they don’t, whose problem is that?

The trial of defendants Stephen Nalty and Steve Byfield is due to wrap up Friday. The prosecution will have taken seven days to present its case and Assistant Attorney General Robert Shapiro intends to object if the defense rebuttal takes more than a half day, maybe a whole. This trial is meant to intimidate the other defendants to convince them to take pleas.

Next in the pipeline is Bruce Doucette whose trial starts October 16. Defendants Harlan Smith and Dave Coffelt have hearings on October 18. If they do not take deals, Shapiro intends to enjoin their cases, to save time and money. He’s already convinced defendant Brian Baylog to take a deal and turn state’s evidence. Baylog is scheduled to testify against Nalty and Byfield shortly.

By now the condemnation of Nalty’s commercial lien scheme will have cost Colorado millions in man hours and legal expenses. You can fine a graffiti artist for having to restore an edifice to its original lustre, but you can’t expect him to bear the full cost if you chose a cleanup crew that wears Gucci loafers, most of whose jobs is to pat the other on the back.

Colorado’s overkill with federal agents and counter-terrorism experts is a problem of its own making.

The Nalty-Byfield trial continues through this week 8:30am – 5pm, at Denver’s Lindsey Flanigan Courthouse, in Division 2H, ironically, “Juvenile Court”.

US, not Assad, drops MOAB Weapon of Mass Destruction on Afghans, same MO used against Philly’s MOVE insurgents.


The US is bragging right now that it’s dropped a GBU-43/B MOAB, aka Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, know in the Chairforce as a “Mother Of All Bombs” bomb, apparently the larger of non-nuclear bombs in its arsenal, on a suspected tunnel in Afghanistan, presumably full of Afghans. Will the UN condemn the US act and support coalition retaliatory airstrikes on the rogue regime which did it? No need for an investigation, we’re on TV admitting to the deed. Note the US war media are adding “in combat” and “on the battlefield” to their headlines although the command and control center allegedly targeted would be Islamic State’s DC.

If the US is going to insist that the MOAB bombing was legal under US rules of engagement, it would be hard to argue that Islamic State Terrorism (see what I did there) could not enjoy a comparable broad latitude.

Normally of course, US spokespeople would deny responsibility, but this bomb was too big. Too big not to break windows five miles away, and too big to smuggle into the hands of covert operatives so that we can say they did it.

#VanillaISIS, Y’AllQaeda, YokelHaram, al-Shabubba waging YeeHawd. Har har there but for the grace of an IQ go you.


So where’s the solidarity? Yes the Bundy rancher insurrection is a fight for settler colonial privilege, Yes the hunter-soldierers are reenacting the Okies land rush of the Indian Territories. Yes this Cabelas militia is waging #YeeHawd against the gub’mint for every wrong reason. Such as, the God-given right to despoil the commons, and such as. But NO these paleoammosexuals are not “terrorists”. They can’t even pack their own lunch. What they are are dumbass carbon-bigfoots. Their hillbilly occupation is a sidearmed rebellion. That said, the camo-twits have declared war on the US government. That’s closer to the barricades than you’ve ever ventured.

Under cover of stupid, they’ve brought guns. It’s unbecoming but the strategy has averted a shutdown thus far. Guns speak truth to power in the language power understands. And the oafs are trying to protect the people’s land from the BLM. That’s your wet dream for stopping pipelines, fracking, and ecocide. Of course these yokels want to facilitate the plunder of nature, but that’s no different than the corporate media. They’re not villains, they’re the shills.

Please stop complaining that if these white privileged jerks were black they’d get the whipping they’d deserve. What are you, cheerleading for a violent authoritarian response?! Same as with rioting fratboys, you don’t have to love them, just don’t call for their smackdown. The police need to ease up with the heavy hand, not spread the brutality with equal opportunity.

Same as the drunk fratboys, these “patriots” have zero political awareness. They are no emergent right wing, they’re not fascists. The Bundy posse is to political movements what the Westboro Baptist Church was to activism. No resemblance. Poisoned apples to oranges.

Cliven Bundy, like Donald Trump, is a distraction from the real fascistm long firmly entrenched.

Of course these poachers should be run off public land, without a federal show of air suppremacy. Don’t echo the call for imperial airstrikes. Instead of igniting a Waco, let’s wait the yokels out, slap them with fines, expropriate their gear and put them in jail. Setting a forest fires should be severely punished. But don’t let me hear supposed anti-government social media pundits cry for the ass-kicking of these wannabe-brighter insurgents.

A regime which terrorizes the have-less with drones and death squads and war has no business defining what is and isn’t terrorism, least of all the push-back.

#NotMyRevolution #FuckYou. First they came for the dumb yokels, but I was not a dumb yokel so I said nothing. It’s not without irony that the point of Martin Niemoller’s lament escapes you.

Requiring activists to “make space” for black or brown voices, if apolitical or reformist, is a counterinsurgency trap.

 
 

 
OFF-STREET ACTIVISM floweth over with do-gooders begging for a seat at the table, literally, tables, where the powers-that-be want them. Street protest organizers are berated about providing forums for disenfranchised voices, as if indoor choir-singing yields redress of grievances. Leaders of disadvantaged communities mistake cis-gendered, white activists for their actual oppressors, because that’s easier than facing down the police. But the dynamic is disingenuous subterfuge and it’s not coming from the allies who matter. The people of Ferguson did not wait for white social justice groups to “make space” for their protest. You’d think the lesson of Ferguson is obvious.

Across non-Ferguson, religious community leaders and token spokespeople of color insist that they should monopolize local manifestations of anti-racism movements. Never mind that their call is for people to sit in church pews, meet with cops, vote, GOTV, petition, or join intra-city marches to nowhere, nowhere more than away from urban uprisings. In Denver I have never seen black resistance voices or leadership unwelcome at any rally no matter the subject. But I have seen tokenism at #BlackLivesMatter events used to discredit radicals and diffuse public outcry.

The making space argument certainly applies to entrenched nonprofit leadership but among militant voices it’s a laugh. If anyone is oppressing upstart minority voices it’s the seniority membership who don’t want unscheduled rocking of the boat. Reformist claptrap is the police state’s first line of defense.

“Black Lives Matter” must be shouted loudly even if your token black appointees won’t. Don’t mind the usual detractors peddling apolitical identity politics, let’s call them IDENTITY A-POLITICS, they’re a counter-revolutionary tactic to divide natural allies. This has been used against insurgents across the country, from Deep Green Resistance to Occupy, as fly-paper to waylay alliances or force effective organizations to go down the old rabbit holes occasioned by the usual novice errors.

Ferguson has shown the way. The anniversary of Mike Brown’s killing on August 9, 2014, correctly commemorates the public uprising not the policeman’s bullet. Unsurprisingly the early emphasis is being placed on ensuring crowd anger doesn’t get out of control. The eyes on the ball, whether blue or brown, focus on the racist police state.

The Black Lives Matter activists who interrupted Netroots Nation shared knowing themes through a people’s mic. Here’s a transcript of what they chanted until shut down by the speakers on stage.

If I die in police custody.
#BlackLivesMatter at #netrootsnation

If I die in police custody,
Do not let my parents talk to
Don Lemon, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson,
Or any of the motherfuckers
Who would destroy my name.
Let my parents know
That my sisters got this.
If I die in police custody,
Say my name, say my name.
Say the name that I chose,
Not the one that I was given.
If I die in police custody,
Make sure that I am remembered.
Make sure my sisters are remembered.
Say their names. Say their names.
If I die in ICE custody,
Say that I am not a criminal.
Stop funding prisons and detention centers!
Shut ICE down and our county jails and our prisons,
Not one more deportation!
If I die in police custody,
Know your silence helped kill me.
White Supremacy helped kill me.
And my child is parentless now.
If I die in police custody,
Know that I want to live!
We want to live!
We fight to live!
Black Lives Matter!
All Black Lives Matter!
If I die in police custody,
Don’t believe the hype, I was murdered!
Protect my family!
Indict the system!
Shut that shit down!
If I die in police custody,
Avenge my death!
By any means necessary!
If I die in police custody,
Burn everything down!
Because no building is worth more than my life.
And that’s the only way motherfuckers like you listen!
If I die in police custody,
Make sure I’m the last person to die in police custody.
By any means necessary!
If I die in police custody,
Do not hold a moment of silence for me!
Rise the fuck up!
Because your silence is killing us!

Want to save Nigerian girls? Buy them! But first ask who is abducting whom?

Western interest are desperate to create public consent for airstrike interventions in Africa, having failed with their KONY 2012 campaign, the Rwanda remembrance handwringing, ad infinitum. Now Nigerian insurgents have thwarted a military “rescue” of two hundred schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram by announcing that the girls will be put up for sale. The western media is spinning a horror story of sexual bondage while trying to ignore the obvious solution: purchase the girls. It’s even cheaper than euthanizing them with drone strikes. The US kills dark-skinned children by the thousands without a care. I have yet to hear anyone consider the circumstance of these Nigerian schoolgirls before they were abducted? Can we know the Chibok girls weren’t repossessed by dissident factions of their own communities? The White House hashtag campaign #bringbackourgirls seems dreadfully Freudian. The kidnapped girls were liberated from our clutches and we want them back. BOKO HARAM is an Islamic movement which opposes Western indoctrination. While it’s labeled “terrorist” outside of Africa, certainly its methods are no worse than those of the Western-imposed dictators ravaging Africa for corporate extraction interests. Western schools in Africa are entry points for providing the labor pools for Capitalism. Are African children better off in our recruiting mechanisms or out of them?

US forces push women to front lines, canon fodder being traditional minority role

Pentagon lifts ban on women in combat. I guess US prisons have consumed the traditional canon fodder labor pool. What’s the upside to this news –a kinder gentler militarized empire? Fail. Our culture of violence doesn’t breed matriarchs. American women on the front lines is good news for insurgents in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc, etc, now Mali, who must welcome the chance to even the score, US forces having targeted so many of their women. And this retaliatory killing comes with no karmic debt, unlike our civilian casualties, because US female soldiers, like gay don’t-ask-don’t-tell turnstile jumpers, are gung-ho eager-for-carnage volunteers. Have at it ladies. Insurgents must be really encouraged by recruiting trends in US schools which promise the prospect of the US soon deploying kids. We owe our colonial victims so many children’s lives.

Gun Control for weapons makers not users, for war mongers not hillbillies

I’m really not big on this call for gun control, mostly because it means to further restrict individual liberties, and especially because the outcry is a media induced hysteria of disreputable provenance, aimed at America’s violence junkies instead of its dealers. Really? Is Going Postal the result of a citizenry not having laws enough to control itself? US prisons reflect a conflicting diagnosis.

In tragic synchronicity with the Sandy Hook school shooting which prompted US public calls for gun control, a knife-wielding madman in China assailed twenty schoolchildren with no resulting fatalities, giving rise to perhaps the first time the non-Mongol West has ever thought it glimpsed greener pastures over the Great Wall.

My takeaway from Bowling for Columbine was not “Gun Control Now!” but the toxic volatility of America’s culture of fear-of-violence-mongering and its gun-ho idolatry. Michael Moore called for a stepping up to our responsibilities, not a surrender to dumbassedness. I hold our national arrested adolescence to be a character flaw of pioneer, frontier provincialism, an adaptation of the civilian contractor settlers conscripted for the Westward Expansion, shock troops of the Enlightenment which became the onslaught of industrial capitalism.

Americans are hicks –we celebrate it– who define our personal space with armed borders. For us it’s bombs not education, simplistic fraternal evangelism over scientific sibling-hood, our pretended easy camaraderie really armed detente: trust but verify. Because of course, American frontierism, yet unable to see itself as invasive, from Columbus to Manila Bay, has been imperial for as long as “Yankee” has been a pejorative; Americans blissfully, Disneyfically unaware.

America’s gun problem isn’t just domestic, it’s export. For gun control I’d like to see a ban on production, not consumption. Unlike drugs whose source is organic, the manufacture of weapons is a centralized racket, easily constricted and regulated. The “Gun Show Loophole” is a stop gap for small fry; let’s muzzle the beast itself. And if you think reining in the weapons industry is improbably Herculean, why-ever do you think now is the time for Hercules to dispense with his Second Amendment protection?

Just because the Right to Bear Arms has come to exclude bazookas or drones, doesn’t mean its intent was not to protect our democracy from authoritarianism. If anyone had construed the Second Amendment as a mere hunting license, Theodore Roosevelt’s national parks would have been seen as encroachments on our revolution-conferred sovereign’s right to poach.

Are Americans thinking that democracy is lost because we can’t have bazookas — that the Second Amendment is inapplicable because the high courts adjudge the masses incapable of self-governance? The “well regulated militia” has surely gone the way of the Home Guard or Neighborhood Watch Committee, as our civic nature moved from social to anti, but it doesn’t diminish the need to have minute-men insurgents to counter would-be tyrants. Obviously we’re not talking about Minute Men privateers to whom police departments can outsource xenophobic vigilantism. If Occupy Wall Street proved anything, it lifted the fog on America’s militarized police state. Public gun ownership may be the only incentive law enforcement has to knock before entering American households.

Can you doubt it’s going to take armed resistance to overthrow Mammon? The world is teetering on uprising and already we’re seeing a stalemate on the streets, between unarmed protester and paramilitary police, a draw which upholds the power imbalance between cries for justice versus patronizing injustice. Is leading by nonviolent example going to overcome the sociopaths squeezing their underlings for blood? I’m not saying that hopes for a nonviolent transformation are misplaced, but these disciples of revolutionary pacifism espouse the same religious dogma that always shackled, never delivered, common man. Factoring sociopaths into the norm of “human nature” has been forever holding back aspirations for a harmonious social construct.

Going Postal in China is demonstrably less fatal, owing to China’s mentally imbalanced having resource only to knives. How utopian to imagine a disarmed populace, those greener pastures being a hellhole of forced interned labor. As an open air prison environmental death camp, Gaza’s got nothing on China.

Prince Harry the Hedonist shows war for what it really, really should not be

A young prince who can do anything he wants, might go to war for some noble cause, if he hadn’t already exposed his and its deeply immoral character. After his Vegas binge, Prince Harry has returned to Afghanistan, his request this time to be a gunner on an Apache attack helicopter in the UK squad with the highest kill rate. It reminds me of the Hapsburg emperor who liked to shoot a peasant each day before breakfast –eventually his handlers had to enlist actors and load the old man’s rifle with blanks. We prefer to look back at old Franz Joseph as senile, but what is the truth about unrestricted inhuman whim?
 
A recent Taliban attack on Camp Bastion, Prince Harry’s base in the Helmund Province, may have been aimed at the bloodthirsty prince. Who can blame the Taliban for targeting a pro-war figurehead which the UK itself is exploiting? It could be however that Prince Harry’s secondary strategic benefit is not dissimilar to the American misuse of anti-Muhammad taunts to provoke insurgents. Drawing more Taliban fighters out of the shadows probably does not displease his royal trigger-happiness. Probably unarmed Austrians shared just as unfavorable odds as Afghans with AK-47s against Harry’s gunship. Let’s hope not.

Collaborators, rats and pigs

I found this unsigned flier in Denver, a collage of the American eagle, globe in mouth, and Stars & Stripes over US misdeeds, clockwise from top left: race lynching, branding slaves, blindfolded Iraqi detainees, combatant corpse desecration, Hiroshima, torture of Viet Cong, My Lai, Columbus’ mass burning of Taíno Indians, Filipino insurgents executed in trenches, the gruesome trophy pic, etc, framing this succinct condemnation: “The US military, intelligence operatives, and police are traitors to humanity. Those who work with them, those who friend them, and those who sleep with them are collaborators. They are rats and pigs.”

Colo. College guest Donald Gregg: the man who hired the man who killed Che

He administered OPERATION PHOENIX during the Vietnam War, the CIA counterinsurgency operation which sought to pacify Vietnam with the targeted assassination of thousands of potential insurgents. For Vice President George H. W. Bush’s office, he coordinated the funding of the illegal US covert war against Central America, aka, the IRAN-CONTRA scandal. Yes, he supervised both Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, each of CIA-state-sponsored-terrorism fame. But Colorado College introduced Donald P. Gregg only as former national security adviser and ambassador to Korea. And CC gave Gregg an honorary degree — with not a peep from the know-nothings they laud as their exemplary students.

I attended because I was insulted by the lecture’s title: “What do Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jung Il have in common?” the speaker further slandered the father of modern Vietnam by indulging to associate another villain to the list, that of Muammar al-Gaddafi. But gracefully Gregg acquitted himself by explaining that Ho Chi Minh had been misjudged, and thus perhaps there is call to engage even our most despicable adversaries in dialog, lest we repeat our mistaken policies, as Gregg believes we are doing in Afghanistan.

Not much objectionable with that. Actually, you can read Gregg’s address, it’s virtually word for word the introduction he wrote for a 2009 study of the CIA’s unheralded successes in Vietnam. To his credit, Gregg does not echo the ongoing theme that Vietnam was winnable.

Relating his more recent expertise about Korea, Gregg offers that Kim Jong Il is more than your common loon. Rather, Il is of unusually high intelligence, underrated by the US, driven despotic by his isolation.

Or driven mad by our offense, I’d add. I’m surprised Kim Jong Il tolerates that we name our ambassador in Seoul as the Ambassador to Korea, rather than to South Korea. How dare US-occupied Korea assert to represent the national identity of Korea? As in Vietnam, it’s the north doing the heavy lifting toward inevitable unification.

Gregg nearly had me convinced he was reformed until he added a forth bogeyman for comparison, Iran.

Iran mustn’t get nukes, etc, etc, Ahmadinejad unpredictable, can’t be trusted, etc.

Ho Chi Minh had been demonized Gregg said, based on a wrong-headed anti-Communist domino-theory mindset, yet Gregg is perfectly willing to be stuck to Capitalism’s current mindset against Islam.

Gregg made such winning arguments for tolerance, respect, diplomacy, and the integrity of the best intelligence officers, but isn’t that precisely the neo-liberal spiel? The CC audience lapped it up.

Here was the closest most of us will ever get to someone connected to the murder of Che Fucking Guevara, icon of the world struggle against Western oppression. That’s explaining the obvious, but I’d add, Che’s heroic stature is no more diminished even if only known as a t-shirt image to this crowd.

School-of-the-Americas-trained Rodriguez knew the stature of the hero he was cutting down, to this day he brags about wearing Che’s watch as a keepsake. Rodriguez returned from this assignment with a piece of notebook paper wrapped around the tobacco left in Guevara’s pipe.

Donald Gregg didn’t kill Guevara, but we might have asked him how many youthful Viet Cong he killed or had tortured, etc, how many aspiring Nicaraguan freedom fighters, or Burmese victims, or boys and girls of yet to be named regions, of the CIA’s yet unrevealed adventures in extrajudicial preemptive death-dealings.

All of this may be blood under the bridge, except that the undercurrent of this elder statesman’s lecture tour is beating the drum for confrontation with Iran.

If you have to ask for whom the fat lady sings, it is not for Tahrir Square.

–And to really mix my malaprops, she sings for them that bought her. If there was one variable which got away from the underdogs of Egypt’s Jan25 Revolution, it was who would referee the endgame. While Hosni Mubarak’s stunning defiance Thursday night looked like a Hail Mary pass hoping to provoke the protesters to mayhem, as a defensive strategy he was moving the goalposts. Anticipating a capitulation, the Tahrir Square demonstrators made clear it was the entire regime which needed ousting, no Suleiman, no Emergency Law, an inviolate list of demands. Mubarak’s insulting buffoonery focused the great beast’s wrath like a rodeo clown. When the announcement came he was stepping down, who could not help but raise a cheer, drowning out the earlier precautions. Mubarak played Egypt like a fiddle, as he burned it, while the fat lady of state media called the game over.

It’s not over until the fat lady sings
So opera advises American football, in reality a game governed strictly by elapsed time. The expression describes the mutual sense that every competition has a natural denouement. Actually another false notion, as this feeling is not often shared by the side fallen behind at the final score.

I’ve convoluted ask not for whom the bell tolls– and if you have to ask how much it costs–, Hemingway and Bugatti I believe, to stress the obvious, that Wagnerian sopranos are kept in furs by the wealthiest of patrons. As epic as might be your struggle, unless you transcend the stage to torch the theater, the status quo raises and lowers the curtain. Without seizing the state media, if even that had been possible, and without staging a narrative to compete with Mubarak’s Greekest of tragic high dives, the Tahrir Square revolutionaries became mere players to please the king.

How could we have missed the grand theatricality of Mubarak’s televised last stands, lighting and makeup dialed to Bela Lugosi? Anyone who knows to dramatize a campfire tale by holding a flashlight under his chin also knows they don’t do that for their profile pic.

In all three of his televised responses to the Jan25 reformers, Mubarak could be paraphrased to have said “over my dead body.” It was a road map his adversaries probably should have heeded. Where is Mubarak now? He’s not gone, he hasn’t even left Egypt. We are informed Mubarak has stepped down by the same henchmen who told protesters “all your demands will be met,” then meeting none.

We learn now that Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Military is trying to clear Tahrir Square. It’s outlawing those who would cause chaos and disorder, and forbidding labor unions to assemble or strike. It’s refusing to end Egypt’s emergency law, or to release the unknown thousand detained during the protests. What of Suleiman and the regime’s other cronies? We have only Mubarak’s doppelganger in an army cap. Field Marshall “Happy” Tantawi, takes to the microphone with no other agenda it appears than to restore Egypt its accustomed sonorous normalcy. If Tibetan throat-singing has an antecedent we can wager now it was Pharaoh throat-talking.

Dance with the one who brought you
A mantra worth cursing out, when Americans wonder why their elected representatives answer only to their biggest campaign donors. So why would Egypt’s Jan25 upstarts have banked on winning the cooperation of the army? I almost said “their” army, but it’s bought and paid for by Mubarak, actually by the same interests who buy US politicians. Deciding not to challenge the army spared lives, but it’s left the military regime in place. Regime unchanged.

There’s a problem when you harness the protection of the military without knowing the intentions of its leaders. You can win a nonviolent revolution against the schoolyard bully if you’ve got the deterrence of “My Bodyguard,” but when the army does that on a national scale it’s called a “bloodless coup.” I’d be curious to know if nonviolence cultists rank bloodless coups among behaviors they condone.

Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement, chief instigators of the Jan25 uprising, attribute much of their organizing skill to training with OTPOR, the famously successful Serbian youth rebellion which ousted a Balkan despot. OTPOR is now a “pro-Democracy” consultant group that tours the world to awaken nascent freedom-seeking insurgents aspiring to popular uprisings. OTPOR refutes insinuations rising from the disclosure that it has accepted CIA funding, but curiously OTPOR is more often by happenstance advising malcontents in Venezuela, Bolivia, Equador, Iran, the usual outspoken rivals to US hegemony. What are they doing in Egypt? Had Hosni Mubarak gone rogue and we didn’t know it?

When pan-Arabists think of events in Tunisia and Egypt igniting popular uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East, there’s a line to draw between the common dictators and those more hostile to the West, whose rule is autocratic by necessity of having to defend against CIA and Mossad activities designed to foment instability.

Whether against anti-US foes or pro, it might be safe to say that OTPOR talks a good game, without having yet had a victory. They too deposed a dictator, but not his regime. The problem with OTPOR’s advice has to do with the end game.

I sat in on an OTPOR seminar once. They make a yearly visit to Colorado College to lecture for the nonviolence program. At the conclusion of one lecture I witnessed a tremendously telling aside, which emerged during the Q&A, and definitely wasn’t in the nonviolence syllabus. I wonder if the A6YM got the memo.

This presenter, a veteran of the student uprising that deposed Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, contended that after this victory for Democracy, etc, etc, after the attention span of the media had moved on, the same Milosevic cronies who’d been driven to the shadows, assassinated the opposition leaders and crept right back to power. His lesson, a mere thesis, which I paraphrase to reflect his muted emphasis: we should maybe have taken it one step further and made sure to kill the fuckers.

A6YM is still gambling they can separate the lower ranks of the army from the brass. If Robert Fisk’s report that Egyptian tank commanders refused January 30 orders to make a Tiananmen Square out of Tahrir, there may still be hope in such a strategy. But it certainly won’t work if no one will announce that it has worked. If a tyrant falls in the forest and no one hears, his rule doesn’t fall. The funeral cortege of Genghis Khan killed everyone in its path to keep word of his death from spreading across the empire until his successor could consolidate power. If you’re not going to push him off the cliff literally, perhaps Slavoj Zizek is right to say you’ve got to create a Tom and Jerry moment where despots like Mubarak see that there is no longer any foundation beneath him, where visualizing his own demise brings it upon himself. But can that be done without having director’s cut over the narrative?

What kind of farce are we perpetuating to pretend that Hosni Mubarak must be granted a dignified exit? What dignity commanded firing on unarmed protesters? Are we to pretend men who torture to retain their power can be cajoled to release it?

Instead, the Egyptian rebels find themselves with no ground beneath their feet, their “victorious revolution” now a meme being used to rally dissenters against America’s chief adversary Iran.

NY Times pretends the Afghanistan War Logs is news that does not fit

Is it surprising that the US newspaper of record, the NYT which prints all the news that’s fit, should declare of the Wikileaks Afghanistan War Logs: there’s nothing much new there? Oh REALLY? Point me to a NYT headline that read US Death Squads, or Civilian Casualties: We DO Body-Counts, or Insurgents Armed With Heat-Seeking Missiles, or War Crimes Being Committed Daily. Are we to accept that the NYT knew about these, but thought wisest not to report them? The only revelation which has been known, Pakistan Directs Taliban, is the leak they’re running with, because those reports are founded on intelligence, ie dubious conjecture, to discredit the others based on first hand accounts, and to rationalize more attacks on Pakistan.

I’m galled even that Wikileaks chose to let the NYT in on the advance team. Of course the NYT went right to the White House and Pentagon to warn them of what was about to be unleashed.

The files were given to three news organizations simultaneously to limit the spin each might try to apply. The move to involve the press in advance was for stories and their context could hit the ground running.

It’s curious that most columnists and news blogs are favoring the Guardian’s analysis the logs, over the NYT’s.

In spite of the peer review, the NYT is pushing back harder the the White House, which isn’t disputing the authenticity of the material, only their outrage that the facts are being made public. Small wonder.

Worse than denying them, the NYT is dismissive. No big deal. And it’s working. The rest of the MSM is characterizing the “alleged” logs as “accusations.” Despite the un-argued official admission that these are the unadulterated records.

Most of the discussion is about the leak itself, and Julian Assange’s motive as an activist. No mention he’s anactivist for “justice.” Not partisan, not pacifist, but moral. You’d think that shouldn’t differentiate him from a journalist.

The NYT has some nerve to pretend the logs aren’t going to bring on a sea change of despondency about the war, even in Iraq. In particular with the soldiers’ families starved for news, who will recognize from the reports the snippets of sensitive information they get from their individual soldier, with no idea it forms the character of the whole picture. We’re fucked. We can’t throw more at it, we can’t fire truer, wiser, safer. This is unwinnable.

And those are the reports our government has been seeing. Maybe that’s what the NYT means to say, we/they already know this material. Our leaders have been reading these reports daily and they don’t dispute that. Their glass-half-full projections for success in Afghanistan is half-full with blood. Now we know it.

That’s the sordid quality of these revelations. Soldiers lives FUBAR. These are more than the Pentagon Papers, these are American war-making unspun, undone.

NYT et al, will have us blame the messenger, condemn Private Bradley Manning for his breach of security. Our national security depends on keeping secrets is their unchallenged theme. Do you believe it’s the media pressing that point? These assholes are embedded so far into America’s military export industry, we need to look elsewhere for the news that’s fit.

What are US Special Forces doing in the Philippines? Killing Filipinos.


At a recent party, I ran into a friend who mentioned her son was in the Philippines. “He’s in the Special Forces,” she explained tentatively in view of her audience, adding disarmingly “who knows what they are doing there.” I couldn’t help but snap back “They’re killing Filipinos is what they’re doing.”

I instantly regretted my cheap shot but spent the ensuing days rationalizing why the Philippines in particular should not have to abide American shoulder-shrugging.

What right has civil society to insulate itself from the unpleasant details about how it maintains order?

If her soldier had been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, I would have held my tongue, in the context of unrelated festivity at least. Whether you support the current occupations or not, the violent facts about who’s doing what are not disputed, generally. I’ve no business facing off with a lone mother who more than likely has mixed feelings about the wars, although put on parade it’s a different story.

Perhaps too, other US interventions prompt only vague comprehension of their nature, of the true evil which our country is perpetrating. But we can say the same thing about commercial enterprises which comprise the capitalist global onslaught. None of it party talk.

Few examples match the longevity of US imperial atrocities in the Philippines. There our public ignorance has no right to be ambivalent.

US military activities in the Philippines may as well be the Indian Wars for all the American public understands them, as racist and despotic, and ongoing. Our specialists have been exterminating Filipino insurgents for over a century. When we are not committing the atrocities ourselves, our military advisers are directing them for what has never risen above a client state. The rebels of Mindanao have been trying to fight off foreign occupation since the original Spanish invaders. They are the Philippines’ indigenous Taliban, and we keep trying to put them down.

The insignia of the 4rth Cavalry still commemorates what we call the “Battle of Bud Dajo” but what was in reality a massacre. where US Marines scaled an extinct crater to mount machine guns to fire into a Moro village and exterminate thousands of men, women and children.

The antiwar, anti-imperialist movement of the early 1900s knew the barbarity which our boys were visiting on the Filipinos. It was US soldiers who popularized “waterboarding” there. But since the facade of granting the islands their independence after WWII, Americans have absolved themselves of what is an ongoing occupation.

Will this be the future of Afghanistan’s puppet regime? Continued suppression of the Afghan’s efforts to fight for their liberty?

De Gaulle urges resistance in occupied France, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan

We applauded the French who raised arms against their occupiers.June 18 marked the 70th anniversary of the Free-French General de Gaulle’s famous 1940 radio address when he urged occupied France to resist because victory over their invaders would be inevitable. Does the western media commemorate de Gaulle’s message without an inkling of irony?

Of course, today’s occupied peoples cannot be offered the same assurance, that help is on its way. Just as Europe was overwhelmed by Hitler’s superior force, de Gaulle knew that US industry would trump that. There will be no white knight to rescue Iraq and Afghanistan, but “L’Appel du 18 Juin,” celebrated in 2010, reaffirms every people’s right to resist foreign invaders. And not nonviolently.

General Petain, leader of France’s Vichy government, was forever condemned for surrendering France and collaborating with the Germans. But he too knew that US industrial might, and its unlimited resources, ensured an allied victory. Petain can be thanked for sparing French cities the excessive ravages of war. Most of France’s historical architecture survived WWII because Petain played along with the occupiers. But France is free today thanks to the resistance.

Rock papers scissors blunderbuss

US Army says our GIs may need bigger guns. No, better history lessons. It appears as if America’s gun makers are lobbying for another US standard issue. The stories are creeping into the newswires that US soldiers need bigger guns. Our 5.56mm isn’t enough stopping power anymore, which explains the relentless insurgencies, they’re not stopping. Well, making historical comparisons isn’t going to serve your argument.
Afghan rifle

Soldiers, experts and a US Army Study are looking back at past adversarial mismarriages of ordnance to spell out why today’s GIs need to arm up. To our M4 assault rifle, the Taliban answers with the AK-47. Every schoolboy knows that, but it’s a differential in caliber that means our opponents can fire from almost twice the distance. While we’re berating the obvious, I’d like to point out their 7.62mm bullets also enjoy a home team advantage which ballistics geeks know affects range and velocity.

Apparently the Soviets had the same disadvantage against the Afghans, the soviets had the AK-47, and they faced rebels with Lee-Enfield or Mauser rifles. The WWII era guns suited the battle better.

Before that, the British were ill-equiped with Brown Bess muskets, against Jezzail flintlocks that ultimately drove every last Englishman out.

Is old better than new, it doesn’t help the case for the weapons makers. I’m reminded of when the crossbow fell to the Welsh longbow. New technology stoned by old, where the simplicity of brute force was the innovation. The Swiss pike figures somewhere in there, long pointed sticks, rough metal tips outclassing honed steel.

Short range versus long range incompatibility is not accidental. Weapons fashioned for the close-in fighting required of enforcing occupation came up short against the partisan sniper on the offensive.

US complaints of drawing the short stick are just keeping with tradition. Astute gun experts point to the M-4’s shortened muzzle as a major reason its fire lacks velocity. The shortened weapon is easier to carry through doors. An early foreshortened firearm used primarily for urban fighting was the blunderbuss. Made even more portable was the dragon, carried by the hated Dragoons, early specialists in oppressing unfree populations.

There are three common threads here, all of them related. The first is the coincidence that our pertinent examples are Afghanistan, and the Afghans never lost, regardless their weapon.

Not unrelated is that the practical, indigenous weapon has always prevailed.

And that’s directly linked to the Law of Insurgency, a principle which shamefully America doesn’t teach in its military academies. Put simply, insurgents always win.

Oh there were good old days of conquest when gunpowder ran roughshod over the stone-aged. Those days went with the conquistadors and the US cavalry.

Some may want to think our crusader edge is back, that an overwhelming US technological supremacy has restored the oppressor’s favorable imbalance, but it’s not true, boots on the ground. Wasn’t that was the lesson of Vietnam? Another lesson despicably cut from the patriot curriculum.

In Vietnam by the way, US GIs carried the larger M-14s, so both sides fired a similarly large 7.62mm round. Did it help?

It may be good military tact to upgrade our Afghan forces to the longer guns. But occupation-wise that puts us back at square one, trying to take the country, not administer it.

The industrial age, and with it the equalizing effect of universal access to weaponry, has meant the end of conquest and twilight for colonial occupations. Populations rise now against post-colonial inequity, but the victor is preordained as the tide.

The lesson for arms dealers who want to sell us more stopping power to kill our foes? Historians know what gunsmiths may deny, there’s no stopping them.

Thinking outside the bomb, in the box

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOMB is a clever antiwar appropriation of Taco Bell’s inventive twist, but since when does imitation break from a box? And does “the bomb” mean what it used to? By the look of their logo, the TOTB activists are not talking about the A-bomb, nor bunker-busters, nor smart-bombs, nor predator drones. Intentionally or not, TOTB they’re invoking the proverbial cartoon explosive, wielded by anarchists or other insurgents, the only means by which social uprisings have ever transcended the box.

“The bomb” was the feared Armageddon of the early nuclear age. More recently, “Food Not Bombs” conflates bombs with militarism because modern war-making, aka peace-keeping, is dominated by aerial bombing. Returning to “bomb” in the singular insinuates nukes, or the mutually-assured destructiveness of endlessly reciprocated violence. So let’s see the bomb depicted more as a nuclear warhead or an artillery shell.

Intrinsic to the plea for nonviolence is the determination to subdue the military instinct with transcendence. And when have proponents of nonviolence exerted jurisdiction over anyone but themselves? Lead by example they cry. We will defeat the barbarians by not becoming barbarians ourselves. Turn the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the earth. I rather suspect, quoth Camelot: “It’s not the earth the meek inherit, it’s the dirt.”

To warmongers I say: think. In of itself, thinking is outside the box enough for you. To peaceniks: exchanging the challenges of human reality for a spiritual realm, is a religious balm that dates to antiquity, about as inside the box as it gets.

William Blum – Anti-Empire Report

Here’s William Blum’s latest essay, on Lincoln Gordon, Brazil, Cuba, and the 2009 Nobel Laureate, reprinted from www.killinghope.org.

THE ANTI-EMPIRE REPORT
By William Blum, January 6, 2009

The American elite

Lincoln Gordon died a few weeks ago at the age of 96. He had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19, received a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, published his first book at 22, with dozens more to follow on government, economics, and foreign policy in Europe and Latin America. He joined the Harvard faculty at 23. Dr. Gordon was an executive on the War Production Board during World War II, a top administrator of Marshall Plan programs in postwar Europe, ambassador to Brazil, held other high positions at the State Department and the White House, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, economist at the Brookings Institution, president of Johns Hopkins University. President Lyndon B. Johnson praised Gordon’s diplomatic service as "a rare combination of experience, idealism and practical judgment".

You get the picture? Boy wonder, intellectual shining light, distinguished leader of men, outstanding American patriot.

Abraham Lincoln Gordon was also Washington’s on-site, and very active, director in Brazil of the military coup in 1964 which overthrew the moderately leftist government of João Goulart and condemned the people of Brazil to more than 20 years of an unspeakably brutal dictatorship. Human-rights campaigners have long maintained that Brazil’s military regime originated the idea of the desaparecidos, "the disappeared", and exported torture methods across Latin America. In 2007, the Brazilian government published a 500-page book, "The Right to Memory and the Truth", which outlines the systematic torture, rape and disappearance of nearly 500 left-wing activists, and includes photos of corpses and torture victims. Currently, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is proposing a commission to investigate allegations of torture by the military during the 1964-1985 dictatorship. (When will the United States create a commission to investigate its own torture?)

In a cable to Washington after the coup, Gordon stated — in a remark that might have had difficulty getting past the lips of even John Foster Dulles — that without the coup there could have been a "total loss to the West of all South American Republics". (It was actually the beginning of a series of fascistic anti-communist coups that trapped the southern half of South America in a decades-long nightmare, culminating in "Operation Condor", in which the various dictatorships, aided by the CIA, cooperated in hunting down and killing leftists.)

Gordon later testified at a congressional hearing and while denying completely any connection to the coup in Brazil he stated that the coup was "the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century."

Listen to a phone conversation between President Johnson and Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, April 3, 1964, two days after the coup:

MANN: I hope you’re as happy about Brazil as I am.

LBJ: I am.

MANN: I think that’s the most important thing that’s happened in the hemisphere in three years.

LBJ: I hope they give us some credit instead of hell.1

So the next time you’re faced with a boy wonder from Harvard, try to keep your adulation in check no matter what office the man attains, even — oh, just choosing a position at random — the presidency of the United States. Keep your eyes focused not on these "liberal" … "best and brightest" who come and go, but on US foreign policy which remains the same decade after decade. There are dozens of Brazils and Lincoln Gordons in America’s past. In its present. In its future. They’re the diplomatic equivalent of the guys who ran Enron, AIG and Goldman Sachs.

Of course, not all of our foreign policy officials are like that. Some are worse.

And remember the words of convicted spy Alger Hiss: Prison was "a good corrective to three years at Harvard."

Mothers, don’t let your children grow up to be Nobel Peace Prize winners

In November I wrote:

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Well, on December 10 the president clutched the prize in his blood-stained hands. But then the Nobel Laureate surprised us. On December 17 the United States fired cruise missiles at people in … not Iran, but Yemen, all "terrorists" of course, who were, needless to say, planning "an imminent attack against a U.S. asset".2 A week later the United States carried out another attack against "senior al-Qaeda operatives" in Yemen.3

Reports are that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Norway is now in conference to determine whether to raise the maximum number of wars allowed to ten. Given the committee’s ignoble history, I imagine that Obama is taking part in the discussion. As is Henry Kissinger.

The targets of these attacks in Yemen reportedly include fighters coming from Afghanistan and Iraq, confirmation of the warnings long given — even by the CIA and the Pentagon — that those US interventions were creating new anti-American terrorists. (That’s anti-American foreign policy, not necessarily anything else American.) How long before the United States will be waging war in some other god-forsaken land against anti-American terrorists whose numbers include fighters from Yemen? Or Pakistan? Or Somalia? Or Palestine?

Our blessed country is currently involved in so many bloody imperial adventures around the world that one needs a scorecard to keep up. Rick Rozoff of StopNATO has provided this for us in some detail.4

For this entire century, almost all these anti-American terrorists have been typically referred to as "al-Qaeda", as if you have to be a member of something called al-Qaeda to resent bombs falling on your house or wedding party; as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American terrorism while being a member of al-Qaeda and people retaliating against American terrorism while NOT being a member of al-Qaeda. However, there is not necessarily even such an animal as a "member of al-Qaeda", albeit there now exists "al-Qaeda in Iraq" and "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula". Anti-American terrorists do know how to choose a name that attracts attention in the world media, that appears formidable, that scares Americans. Governments have learned to label their insurgents "al-Qaeda" to start the military aid flowing from Washington, just like they yelled "communist" during the Cold War. And from the perspective of those conducting the War on Terror, the bigger and more threatening the enemy, the better — more funding, greater prestige, enhanced career advancement. Just like with the creation of something called The International Communist Conspiracy.

It’s not just the American bombings, invasions and occupations that spur the terrorists on, but the American torture. Here’s Bowe Robert Bergdahl, US soldier captured in Afghanistan, speaking on a video made by his Taliban captors: He said he had been well-treated, contrasting his fate to that of prisoners held in US military prisons, such as the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "I bear witness I was continuously treated as a human being, with dignity, and I had nobody deprive me of my clothes and take pictures of me naked. I had no dogs barking at me or biting me as my country has done to their Muslim prisoners in the jails that I have mentioned."5

Of course the Taliban provided the script, but what was the script based on? What inspired them to use such words and images, to make such references?

Cuba. Again. Still. Forever.

More than 50 years now it is. The propaganda and hypocrisy of the American mainstream media seems endless and unwavering. They can not accept the fact that Cuban leaders are humane or rational. Here’s the Washington Post of December 13 writing about an American arrested in Cuba:

"The Cuban government has arrested an American citizen working on contract for the U.S. Agency for International Development who was distributing cellphones and laptop computers to Cuban activists. … Under Cuban law … a Cuban citizen or a foreign visitor can be arrested for nearly anything under the claim of ‘dangerousness’."

That sounds just awful, doesn’t it? Imagine being subject to arrest for whatever someone may choose to label "dangerousness". But the exact same thing has happened repeatedly in the United States since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We don’t use the word "dangerousness". We speak of "national security". Or, more recently, "terrorism". Or "providing material support to terrorism".

The arrested American works for Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI), a US government contractor that provides services to the State Department, the Pentagon and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). In 2008, DAI was funded by the US Congress to "promote transition to democracy" in Cuba. Yes, Oh Happy Day!, we’re bringing democracy to Cuba just as we’re bringing it to Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2002, DAI was contracted by USAID to work in Venezuela and proceeded to fund the same groups that a few months earlier had worked to stage a coup — temporarily successful — against President Hugo Chávez. DAI performed other subversive work in Venezuela and has also been active in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other hotspots. "Subversive" is what Washington would label an organization like DAI if they behaved in the same way in the United States in behalf of a foreign government.6

The American mainstream media never makes its readers aware of the following (so I do so repeatedly): The United States is to the Cuban government like al-Qaeda is to the government in Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government agents. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds or communication equipment from al-Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al-Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States, evidence usually gathered by Cuban double agents. Virtually all of Cuba’s "political prisoners" are such dissidents.

The Washington Post story continued:

"The Cuban government granted ordinary citizens the right to buy cellphones just last year." Period.

What does one make of such a statement without further information? How could the Cuban government have been so insensitive to people’s needs for so many years? Well, that must be just the way a "totalitarian" state behaves. But the fact is that because of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, with a major loss to Cuba of its foreign trade, combined with the relentless US economic aggression, the Caribbean island was hit by a great energy shortage beginning in the 1990s, which caused repeated blackouts. Cuban authorities had no choice but to limit the sale of energy-hogging electrical devices such as cell phones; but once the country returned to energy sufficiency the restrictions were revoked.

"Cubans who want to log on [to the Internet] often have to give their names to the government."

What does that mean? Americans, thank God, can log onto the Internet without giving their names to the government. Their Internet Service Provider does it for them, furnishing their names to the government, along with their emails, when requested.

"Access to some Web sites is restricted."

Which ones? Why? More importantly, what information might a Cuban discover on the Internet that the government would not want him to know about? I can’t imagine. Cubans are in constant touch with relatives in the US, by mail and in person. They get US television programs from Miami. International conferences on all manner of political, economic and social subjects are held regularly in Cuba. What does the American media think is the great secret being kept from the Cuban people by the nasty commie government?

"Cuba has a nascent blogging community, led by the popular commentator Yoani Sánchez, who often writes about how she and her husband are followed and harassed by government agents because of her Web posts. Sánchez has repeatedly applied for permission to leave the country to accept journalism awards, so far unsuccessfully."

According to a well-documented account7, Sánchez’s tale of government abuse appears rather exaggerated. Moreover, she moved to Switzerland in 2002, lived there for two years, and then voluntarily returned to Cuba. On the other hand, in January 2006 I was invited to attend a book fair in Cuba, where one of my books, newly translated into Spanish, was being presented. However, the government of the United States would not give me permission to go. My application to travel to Cuba had also been rejected in 1998 by the Clinton administration.

"’Counterrevolutionary activities’, which include mild protests and critical writings, carry the risk of censure or arrest. Anti-government graffiti and speech are considered serious crimes."

Raise your hand if you or someone you know of was ever arrested in the United States for taking part in a protest. And substitute "pro al-Qaeda" for "counterrevolutionary" and for "anti-government" and think of the thousands imprisoned the past eight years by the United States all over the world for … for what? In most cases there’s no clear answer. Or the answer is clear: (a) being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or (b) being turned in to collect a bounty offered by the United States, or (c) thought crimes. And whatever the reason for the imprisonment, they were likely tortured. Even the most fanatical anti-Castroites don’t accuse Cuba of that. In the period of the Cuban revolution, since 1959, Cuba has had one of the very best records on human rights in the hemisphere. See my essay: "The United States, Cuba and this thing called Democracy".8

There’s no case of anyone arrested in Cuba that compares in injustice and cruelty to the arrest in 1998 by the United States government of those who came to be known as the "Cuban Five", sentenced in Florida to exceedingly long prison terms for trying to stem terrorist acts against Cuba emanating from the US.9 It would be lovely if the Cuban government could trade their DAI prisoner for the five. Cuba, on several occasions, has proposed to Washington the exchange of a number of what the US regards as "political prisoners" in Cuba for the five Cubans held in the United States. So far the United States has not agreed to do so.

Notes

  1. Michael Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes 1963-1964 (New York, 1997), p.306. All other sources for this section on Gordon can be found in: Washington Post, December 22, 2009, obituary; The Guardian (London), August 31, 2007; William Blum, "Killing Hope", chapter 27
  2. ABC News, December 17, 2009; Washington Post, December 19, 2009
  3. Washington Post, December 25, 2009
  4. Stop NATO, "2010: U.S. To Wage War Throughout The World", December 30, 2009. To get on the StopNATO mailing list write to r_rozoff@yahoo.com. To see back issues: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/
  5. Reuters, December 25, 2009
  6. For more details on DAI, see Eva Golinger, "The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela" (2006) and her website, posting for December 31, 2009
  7. Salim Lamrani, professor at Paris Descartes University, "The Contradictions of Cuban Blogger Yoani Sanchez", Monthly Review magazine, November 12, 2009
  8. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/democ.htm
  9. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/polpris.htm

Identity of CIA bomb victims spill forth

khost victim of CIA bomberUS forces in Afghanistan suffered an unprecedented setback this weekend when a suicide bomber was able to blow to smithereens a gathering of CIA operatives in an outpost in Khost Province. Seven agents were killed and six injured, and a great tragedy is that these covert deaths, like that of the security contractor killed with them, are not counted as official casualties of war, to weigh against the public conscience for us to wonder, was it worth it? These were professional killers and torturers whose names are now withheld to protect their families.

But some Americans –God bless them– will not be denied the deification of their downed warriors, and so some families have gone public about the loss of their mercenary kin. Thus we have names, and Facebook memorials, to the men and women who commit the clandestine crimes for which the rest of the world holds us accountable. But first, a word about what they were doing.

Forward Operating Base Chapman caught my attention because that’s the kind of military post which protects the celebrated school building projects of Greg Mortenson, and Khost Province is one of his territories. It turns out that the US Army is also busy [re]-building schools, and boasts 53 in Khost. Also, for reasons of deteriorating security, FOB Chapman was no longer housing US military, but instead was strictly for private firms contracted to the reconstruction, except now journalists are at liberty to say that the camp was always known to be “not regular” — code for CIA.

“Although Chapman was officially a camp for civilians involved in reconstruction, it was well-known locally as a CIA base. Over the past couple of years, it focused on gathering information on so-called high-value targets for drone attacks, the unmanned missile planes that have played a growing role in taking out suspected terrorists since President Barack Obama took office. The Haqqanis were their principal target.

” ‘That far forward they were almost certainly from the CIA’s paramilitary rather than analysts,’ said one agent.”

So FOB Chapman was used for a drone command post. Not controlling drones, but gathering intelligence about where to target their missiles. I’d be curious that what had been an “underground gym” for US soldiers, where the dozen CIA officers were meeting their informant/surprise-bomber, wasn’t being put to an altogether more menacing function by the CIA. Obviously on this particular occasion it was a briefing room/wake.

It’s conjectured that the CIA at FOB Chapman was targeted because the local Taliban had suffered one too many CIA drone attacks. Other accusations emerge that the CIA had recently killed Afghan detainees while in custody, in their effort to break the Haqqani network. One reporter’s source phrased it: “Those guys have recently been on a big Haqqani binge.”

The CIA is not releasing the name of the bomber, reportedly an informant “candidate,” but strangely his name is being reported in the Arabic press. He was a Jordanian doctor named Khalil Abu Hammam Mellal Al-Balawi, of the Beer Al-Saba’a family, codenamed “Abu Dajana Al-Kharasani,” a supervisor on the Al-Hisba internet forums, where so-called official al-Qaeda communications are regularly transmitted. His identity might explain how a visit with this “informant” warranted the attendance of a dozen agents, including a high ranking officer from Kabul and the Khost station chief.

The station chief was reported to have been an agent in Afghanistan for 14 years, since the days of the so-called Alec Station which was tasked with tracking the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. She was a loving mother of three, so it’s possible her identity is being concealed until her family can be extracted from the region.

The first agent to be identified publicly was Harold Brown Jr., 37, of Bolton, Mass., whose father thought he worked for the State Department. Before the “State Department,” Brown worked for Science Applications International Corp.

The next to be identified was Scott Michael Roberson, 39, of Akron, Ohio. He was a policeman when he wasn’t a CIA security officer. Robertson co-founded the Metro Atlanta Police Emerald Society and was a member of the Iron Pigs, a national motorcycle club for police and firefighters.

Another of the CIA agents wasn’t American at all, but a member of the Jordanian royal family. The body of Capitan As-Sharif Ali bin Zeid Al Awn has been returned to Jordan with much pomp and ceremony, without an official report of the incidence of his death, the family unable to explain what he was doing in Afghanistan, except to deny accusations that he was employed by the CIA.

The lone non-CIA victim was security contractor and former Navy SEAL, Jeremy Jason Wise, 35, of Virginia Beach. Wrote the WSJ: “Today, the CIA and President Obama acknowledged that seven of those killed were CIA agents. No one would say who employed the eighth American.”

(Except he was really the seventh American, because one of the dead was a Jordanian.)

UPDATE: It’s now revealed that Jeremy Wise was employed by Xe/Blackwater, who admit now that two of the CIA victims were Blackwater.

With suicide bombers all over the news, from the successful to the pantywaist, as blogs spill over with nuke-em-all comments which reveal Americans seem perfectly comfortable with the idea that peoples are collectively accountable for the deeds of criminals among them.

Or the deeds of insurgents aka freedom fighters, about whom you or I might disagree.

US Blackwater goons for example, have been let off the hook for the Nisour Square atrocity in Iraq. According to our neoliberal world order, Iraq should be able to track miscreants with drones, and since we refuse to bring them to justice, lay waste entire American neighborhoods and schools if informants report they are nearby.

I’ve certainly always argued that Americans are all of us responsible for the crimes our government is committing. Even with our combatant criminals killed in battle, I’m not sure that the people who cheered them on don’t still owe their victims responsibility.

Drones vulnerable to P2P filesharing?

The WSJ headline screams “Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones … Iranian Backing Suspected.” Hmm. Why Iran — because insurgents can’t afford $25.99 SkyGrabber software? Captured Iraqi laptops have evidence of intercepted video feeds, not code. The hacking term is no misnomer. Instead of calling the footage “hijacked” or “received,” the data is described as “stolen” and “pirated,” which would seem to betray an inviting vulnerability to SkySoftware’s reach. Are they saying there’s a UAV feed that can be harvested by a distributed file-sharing exploit? Imagine a drone-watch network for nabbing unwarranted military surveillance: DroneWire. By going after too many birds with this story, the DoD confirms its armed unmanned vehicles are patrolling not just Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but Yemen and Somalia, where our distributed representative Democracy has no legal authority to conduct extrajudicial assassinations.

Give this lackey a new directive

Lekki PeninsulaBagnewsNotes has juxtaposed two photos of African colonialism. One taken more than a century ago shows a white bwana being ferried by two porters, the second is the recent image at left. The difference is that today’s servants are trusted with weapons because they have to double as security, the continent being more dangerous now than when it was darkest Africa. According to photographer Paolo Woods, the colonial industrialist beneath the umbrella, stands before a 544 villa development in Nigeria, built on the Lekki Peninsula to suit Chevron Oil. For this go-round of postcards from the outlands, could anti-imperialist venture capitalists raise funds to give these Nigerian servants more than pieces of silver? The-world-is-watching age of the internet could offer these henchmen several times more their pay to gun down the light-skinned slave masters point-blank, instead of defending them against Nigeria’s oppressed victims.

Subcomandante Marcos on LA OTRA

EZLN Zapatistas Subcomandante MarcosReading more about the Tohono O’odham, I came across this speech by the EZLN’s masked leader Subcomandante Marcos, delivered at a 2006 tribal gathering of SW Native American insurgents. It’s about the other Mexico, in solidarity with the other Americas: “La Otra.”

Compared his words to President Obama today telling the tribal summit in DC: “You will not be forgotten.” Sounds like a eulogy.

Doesn’t it? Or simply another white man’s empty promise. It appears to me that Obama is playing the forked tongue white man to Americans of every color, giving them assurances that they are now in good hands, yet turning his back on them all when the speeches are through. It’s Obama the great equalizer, making sure that all Americans, Red, White, Brown and Black, get treated like they’re black.

EZLN: A Meeting with the O’odham
By Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

O'odham meetingLa Otra – The Other Mexico
October 26, 2006

Bueno, Compañeras and Compañeros:

First we just want to thank the Monroy family, who is receiving the Sixth Commission and the Karavana’s compañeros, who are giving us lodging here, in… Rancho el Peñasco is it called? Thank you Compañeros and Compañeras. And thank you to all of you who have endured the six hours that we have been here, and I hope you have a little patience for what I am going to say.

We especially want to thank the traditional O’odham authorities. Don José, Doña Ofelia – I don’t see her anymore – Is Doña Ofelia still here? No? Brenda, Doña Brenda? They’re not here either, what a pity. Doña Alicia? Well, that’s what happened to us. The traditional authorities went away and we came to listen to them. No? But Don José is here, as I want to bring a message from the indigenous Zapatista communities to the Tohono O’odham people, and also for the Navajo and Cherokee people.

What the compañero, the Purépecha chief Salvador said, from the National Indigenous Congress, also represents our thinking. The traditional O’odham chief, Doña Ofelia, pointed out something that we already see in the papers. That thing that a few people are promoting here, the National Indigenous Convention, is a lie. It is really directed by someone who was an official under President Vicente Fox, and later was unemployed and is now involved with the National Indigenous Convention, which is really a movement to support López Obrador. The Indian peoples don’t interest them. The documents, which they are presenting, which those people are distributing, make no mention of the San Andrés Accords, which have cost blood and death not just to Zapatistas, but to more than 40 Indian peoples, tribes and nations of Mexico, who are in agreement with that struggle. We are in agreement with what was expressed by Doña Ofelia, the O’odham traditional authority.

“We are Zapatistas. We live in the last corner of this country. We are of Mayan roots. We are people of Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, Chol, Zoque and Mam roots.” And it is our custom at times to speak, when we speak with other Indian peoples, to use a symbolic language with tales and legends – ”sometimes we speak about our history, our goals, with tales, legends and symbolic language, and in this time that we have this message for the O’odham and Navajos and Cherokees, we take this root.” To pass on this message that the Compañeros sent me to tell you, we will use that resource. Our elders, our chiefs, say that the gods made the world, that they made the men and women of corn first. And they specifically put the heart of corn in them. But the corn ran out and some men and women didn’t get a heart. The color of the earth ran out, and they began to look for other colors. Then, the heart of corn touched people who are white, red or yellow. So there are people here who don’t have the dark color of indigenous people, but they have the heart of corn, so they are here with us. Our oldest ones say, our chiefs, that the people who didn’t get a heart, took care of it later, they occupied the empty space with money, and that it doesn’t matter what color those people have, they have a heart that is the green color of money. And our old ones also say that, every once in a while, the land seeks to protect its O’odham Representative Doña Ofeliaand Subcomandante Marcos children, the men and women of corn. And that a time comes – which is when the night is the most difficult – when the land gets tired and needs those men and women to help it live.

They were killing our people with diseases, we were going to disappear, just like the Kiliwa people are disappearing, a few hundred kilometers from here where we are, where there are only 54 families left. And of them, only four speak the Kiliwa language here in Mexico, on this side.

We want to say to the O’odham nation, to the Navajo – I don’t know if Michelle is still here? No, not her either, well, we don’t have any messenger, I hope that someone tapes it… pardon me, Michelle. What happened is that in our land, our chiefs – I am a Subcomandante, because I am not the chief – my chiefs are men and women like Doña Ofelia, like Don José, 100 percent indigenous. And it fell on me – together with other compañeros – to do other work.

We were already dead and we were called upon to become warriors, according to our legend. And as we were dead, we became what we are: shadows. And in a strict sense we are that: “shadow’s warriors or warriors of the shadows.” And January 1, 1994, on the wall of a bank in San Cristóbal de las Casas, appeared a sign that we painted which said: here we are the forever dead, dying again, but now to live. And that was the message that we were giving to the rest of the world: that in this country and on this planet, one had to fight and be willing to die to be able to survive.

In the story that we are telling – or what they ordered us to tell you – the land protected us after the Spanish invasion, and it made us survive and resist the North American invasion, and it made us live. And after the invasion of money or big capital, the land that made us survive is at the point of dying, precisely because of those above. If you think that they are going to conform themselves to seeing us as poor people, without schools, without medicine, you are wrong: they want us to disappear completely.

For entire decades we have been living with diseases, without education, scratching the earth to be able to take some produce from it. Now they also want that land. The Escalera Nautica will mean the total disappearance of the Yoreme, the Mayo, Cucapá and Yaqui peoples from the whole coast of Sinaloa, Sonora, Baja California and Baja Sur, for hotel and tourist businesses. There’s not going to be anything more than deceit from the government, for the Yoreme, the Yaqui, the O’odham, the Cucupá and the Kiliwa.

The governments and those who lead them want that land to convert it into a commodity. If we permit that, this land is going to be destroyed. And that which protected us, that made us survive, is also going to die. And if that land and that world die, there will be no reason to fight, or to live, or to study.

What we are proposing here is that we have to unite as Indian peoples. Land dies the same way in O’odham, Navajo, Cherokee, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Purépecha and Náhuatl territory, and we must unite, but not only in Mexico, but on the whole continent.

They, those who are up above, have already shown for hundreds of years, for centuries, that the only thing that they have done has been to destroy the earth. No more – “no more that’s enough” – it’s sufficient. Now we have to take the land’s destiny and its defense into our hands. Don’t leave it one minute more in the hands of the rich. We, those who have the color of the earth and hearts of corn, without regard to our skin color – we have to do it, because if we don’t, the whole world is going to disappear.

To the one who has money, what’s happening is not important. O’odham and Navajo territory is now a territory of death. Your fields, where your culture flourishes, is where poor Mexicans are killed, families who try to cross to the other side. The O’odham and Navajo people cannot permit that. You know that they are converting our lands, besides, into their garbage can: we are their garbage dumps. Toxic wastes, nuclear wastes, are not going to the residential zones, not in New York or Washington: they are going to Indian lands. And land is like the human body; one cannot inject poison into one part without affecting the rest. They think that they will only poison O’odham and Navajo land. They are going to poison everything and they are going to destroy it.

As the National Indigenous Congress compañero said: “we came to invite you, not to ask the government, but to get rid of it.” Not to be praying that the North American and Mexican governments respect O’odham territory, which is divided by the borderline. And we know that the borderline crosses through your people’s ceremonial center. We want that border to disappear, so that once again the O’odham, Navajo and Cherokee nations exist, as well as our peoples, because they already demonstrated that they cannot conduct this world and take it to a good end. We have to do it, not just for our Indian peoples, but for all humanity. Therefore, we say that our struggle is for humanity and against neoliberalism.

We wanted to invite you to join this movement, which is called the Other Campaign, so that as Indian peoples, the history of each 100 years is not repeated again. It is going to be repeated, but one part is going to change.

In 1810, we struggled for independence against Spanish power; in 1910, against the landowner’s power. In 2010 – and even before – we will struggle against the power of money. But, differently than the 200 and 100 years before, now the Indian peoples will have to be respected. The same thing will not occur again: that another comes to power and the Indian peoples disappear again, or suffer the same poverty and scorn. Therefore, as Indian peoples, we form separately inside of the Other Campaign, and separately we talk to each other and separately we make agreements.

Those who are up there above, compañeros and compañeras of Sonora – Yaquis, Yoremes, Cucapás, O’odham – are only going to deceive you. They are going to buy off one or two of you, they are going to take them on a trip – like traveling around with those who distributed the paper just now – around the world, but their people are going to disappear. And if you are the leaders, it is certain, they are going to take you to hotels, or to the conventions those that the politicians have, but your people are going to disappear. And photos of your leaders are going to come out in the newspapers, but the garbage dump is going to poison your land.

And there will be many gatherings and declarations, but our poor Mexican men and women are going to continue dying on Navajo land, or on the land of the O’odham. Those things are not going to change if we continue believing in those above.

And that’s what the Sonoran government is going to do, after this meeting you are going to see it. It is going to declare that it will resolve the indigenous problem, it is going to seek you out and it is going to invite you to the big hotels; it’s going to give you good food, and it is going to put papers in front of you to sign. It is going to give you some aid and some credit. But nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to change in your territories.

The San Andrés Accords, which are the ones that represent the agreement of more than 40 peoples, tribes, nations and neighborhoods of the Indian peoples of Mexico, they say one thing that everyone forgets they say: that indigenous territory is indigenous. No one can do anything in indigenous territory if the community doesn’t accept it. Not putting a garbage dump, or a hotel, not even crossing through your territory without permission from the authorities – which is certainly what the compañera Ofelia was complaining about, and about which we also complain.

That is what we are saying wherever we go. And in this case, we were thinking that we were only going to talk with the O’odham people, or with Indian peoples, but how good it is that you arrived from many places. And especially, the people who are struggling on the other side in the United States, also with Indian peoples, and also with this injustice, this war of annihilation there is against the undocumented.

A little while ago when we were coming here, we crossed the border, there in Sonoyta, we crossed over on the other side and later we returned because we had to come here. But the big extension of the desert was seen and I was thinking – I imagined what all the compañeros from the Karavana – what it was going to mean crossing that desert, without food. If the heat or the cold doesn’t kill you, the Minutemen kill you, or the ranchers, or the motorcyclists, or La Migra. And no one was going to take count, not even the university studies. If we, as Indian people, do not unite… We are proposing a continental gathering of all the original peoples of these lands, in October of the coming year, when 515 years of the “discovery” are completed. Now it was good! 500 years are enough to show that they couldn’t.

And if the governments of the United States or Mexico didn’t see us when we were few, we will see if the world doesn’t see us when all the Indian peoples of this continent – from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska – unite and begin to tell of all the injustices and struggles. And that gathering is going to be in Northwest Mexico, near the border – which does not exist for us – in other words near the Oodham, Navajo, Cherokee, Cucapá, Kiliwa, Yoreme, Yaqui land, where we have been all these days. In a few days, we are making agreements with each other and taking votes, perhaps next month this call that we are proposing will come out.

That is more or less what we want to tell you. I hope you can pass the message to the traditional chiefs: Ofelia, Brenda, Alicia – Don José is here – Michelle: I ask a favor that you pass it to the Navajo people, the compañera with the Cherokee people.

We only ask you that, we are going to talk directly among ourselves and make an agreement. The next time that we come my chiefs will come, I will not come, they sent me first to see how it was. I report to them and then they will come, those that command me, because that is our way.

That is what we want to say, compañeros and compañeras. Many thanks, Good Night.

Uzi Landau doesn’t steal Palestinian homes because there is no such thing

Dr. Uzi Landau speaks to University of Colorado Denver, October 28
DENVER- Israeli PR envoy Uzi Landau addressed CU Denver students today, the majority of whom were antagonistic to his message. Denver policemen lined the walls, altar and choir loft, as Landau went on about the mortal threat which “extremist” Islam poses to Judeo-Christian civilization. Landau likened Iran to Nazi Germany and Ahmadinejad to Hitler, but had no comparison for the nefarious and subversive terror plots which Iran has been foisting on the free world. I’m thinking perhaps, like the CIA or Mossad?

Landau entered the room strangely like a Mafia don, flanked by an entourage of black coats and security. A well dressed man and a woman who an hour earlier had been loitering behind me as I protested outside, and whom I took to be Russian when I heard them speak to each other, now appeared as part of Landau’s party.

CU Denver Auraria Campus in front of church

Due to the sudden snowfall, the campus closed for the afternoon. As a result, the turnout for Landau’s speech was sparse. The security detail of Denver and campus police officers which subjected attendees to metal detectors and bag searches, and kept vigil from the sidelines, would have been disproportionate even if all the seats had been filled. One got the impression that law enforcement were there to assure the audience stayed awake and respectful. Policemen could be seen conspicuously conferring about the seating area occupied by activist Glenn Spagnuolo and his colleagues. When Glenn rose and walked forward to queue for the microphone, a handful of the officers adjusted their positions accordingly.

Glenn was responsible for pulling together voices to oppose Uzi Landau’s appearance. Glenn had a personal connection to Landau, having worked in the occupied territories like Rachel Corrie, and knew the activist who was ultimately killed by a bulldozer working under orders of Uzi Landau. Subsequent to that event, Glenn was deported to Jordan.

When Glenn announced the protest against Landau’s visit, the CU organizers were faced with additional security costs, for which they had no budget. Attempts were made to negotiate calling off the protest. Ultimately the Israeli embassy fronted the funds for the added police.

You might ask, against whom were the officers protecting Uzi Landau? Considering audience members had already been search for weapons, were the police trying to prevent a citizen’s arrest?

The good news, Israeli PR envoy Uzi Landau is not a very good speaker. His heavy accent and habit of letting his voice trail off confident the audience is hanging on his words, makes Landau a fortuitous emissary for those cheering against a military attack upon Iran. The bad news is that landau is as far right as they come, and if he’s reaching sympathetic ears, there are too many racist Americans without any understanding of international law.

I was surprised to discover that this Israeli minister’s talking points were no more nuanced than the flack we receive at this website from IDF Internet Megaphone trolls. Landau reflected the same disrespect for the people from whom lands were taken, and are still being taken. He argued that soldiers must be permitted to target insurgents regardless the civilian casualties.

Landau spoke confidently without batting an eye about the plight of Palestinians. He justified increased Israeli settlements based on Israel’s better record of land stewardship, and of course, he argued that anti-Semitism nugget: why should there be any lands forbidden to Jews? Specifically, to paraphrase: “If Israel can be 20% Palestinian, why cannot the Occupied Territories be 20% Jewish?”

Because Israel then builds walls around settlements and claims more land.

To his credit, Uzi Landau was entertainingly pugilistic in his response to audience questions. Instead of ignoring comments being made out of turn, he took them on, so confident and self-righteous he was about Israel’s actions. Even in Gaza, even in the context of over 60 years of occupation. But to Landau, the Palestinian Problem is dismissed easily. Palestinians don’t exist. They didn’t exist, they didn’t accept the offers of statehood when given the chance, their opportunity past, they never were.

Landau accused his detractors of offering no facts. He, on the other hand, came equipped with facts. One fact of his, from history: Even before it was declared a Jewish nation by the UN, the land of Israel had been in continuous possession of the Jews. So called “Palestinians” only came to the area for the jobs the Israelis offered them.

One of the best questions posed had to do with borders. If G-d promised the holy land to the Jews, which land was that precisely, as defined by what borders? For example, the UN granted land to inaugurate the nation of Israel. It didn’t include Jerusalem, nor much of to what Israel is laying claim. Does the “promised land” encompass more than Israel has even now? What can be the expected boundaries of Israel’s assumed birthright?

Dr. Landau didn’t dwell long on this polemic, except to say with a smile: “that will depend on our neighbors.”

Armed UAS drones need no defending

Predator Unmanned Attack VehicleI was curious about the etymology of the term “drone” applied to military (& DHS) Unmanned Aerial Surveillance aircraft, these days, mostly Armed. Obviously Armed UAS are not named after the stingless unproductive bees whose task it is to impregnate the queen, nor lazy idlers, nor clueless computer sales techies, nor thankless menial worker drones. Anyone who’s been around Radio Controlled model planes knows drones are named for the sound they make, a steady drone as they labor across the sky. While military aerial surveillance predates the Wright Brothers, and RC model airplanes have been around for half that time, it took the advent of asymmetric warfare to open the window to military drones. Their constant buzz offering the most intractable reason.

By “asymmetric” I do not mean the US intelligence code for off-textbook warfare, for counter-insurgency methods outside von Clausewitz etiquette. I mean the inherency they obscure, war between foes lopsided.

Look at a drone’s design. It’s more Gossamer Condor than military aircraft. Obviously an unmanned vehicle comprises fewer mechanical systems because it doesn’t need to propel, nor sustain, a crew of human beings. It might need less armature for the same reason, except of course, today’s drones are of high value in their own right. So why no armament?

Why too, no powerful jet engines or swept wings for aeronautic superiority? This drone looks about as robust as a paper glider. Laymen can distinguish bombers from jet fighters, as they can trucks from a race cars. I’d say the military drone resembles more a stick insect than its accidental namesake the bee. Do Armed UASs have no need for evasive maneuver capability?

I’ll ask another obvious question, why do drones carry no customary insignia designating to whose side it belongs? In particular this element would be of primary importance when encountered by other aircraft.

But a drone doesn’t encounter enemy aircraft, nor allied aircraft who might confuse it for belonging to an adversary, because drones operate where aerial supremacy is already absolute. The key to a drone’s military usefulness is that there is no opponent to shoot it down.

An Armed UAS can drone all it wants, taking its sweet time laying siege to defenseless objectives and other targets of opportunity. The US Predator or Reaper models can glide when they want to surveil in silence, although otherwise their motors project their presence with the deliberate imposition of a school hall monitor. It is more efficient to deter the placing of IEDs than to try to catch insurgents in the act.

Meanwhile all civilians are terrorized by the sound, associating it with sudden, unpredictable and often unjustified destruction and death.

The WWII German Stuka dive bomber had inverted gull wings which were thought to produce a horrifying wail as the notorious aircraft attacked city populations, Guernica among them. In fact the sound was produced by a siren the Nazis called Jericho’s Trumpet, mounted purposefully to spread fear on the ground. Like modern drones, the Stuka were not designed to fend off attackers from the sky.

Before the fighter planes of WWI, artillery spotters would rise in balloons to survey the enemy trenches. From these tethered balloons, artillery strikes could be directed with increasing accuracy. These remote eyes in the sky were the rudiments of aerial surveillance, the precursors to today’s Armed UAS. The balloons were manned obviously, and they weren’t armed, but the spotters they held aloft were despised much as drones are today. When WWI biplanes eventually came along to pick off the balloonists like sitting ducks, the soldiers in the trenches were jubilant.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban had been fortified by the US military. We’d helped the Taliban destabilize the region, to force Russia’s hand in rushing to restore order to its southern neighbor. We wanted to draw the Russian troops in before we assisted the Afghan insurgency with the real weapons it needed to combat their invaders’ superior fire power. When Bin Laden’s Mujihadeen and the Taliban got US Stinger Missiles, the Russians could no longer deploy their helicopter gunships with impunity and the end drew near.

Eventually whoever drew the US into its war on Islam, is going to start distributing the means to take the US out. It might be Stinger Missiles or a modern equivalent. Eventually someone will develop sympathy for the victimized Muslims of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza (add Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc) and help them flick the killer drones from the sky.

Would attacking the drones provide retribution enough, knowing that the real operators are safe in virtual cockpit command centers located safely within US homeland borders. Would it be sufficient to keep clearing the skies of drones, or will our victims have to weed US drones from the roots?

Will the drones prove as easily replaceable as GIs? The American Public keeps count of its lost soldiers, but in no way has this stanched the flow of fresh reinforcements. We do not count expended ordnance, or expensive equipment fallen casualty. Would such tallies discourage the war mongers or encourage weapons industry stockholders?

The American public has shown itself mostly contemptuous of the economic-draft soldiers who man today’s volunteer army, the deaths accumulate, but working poor are expendable. What about those who joined the military to clean up their act? We don’t want those back. After years of war, the public is already seeing too much PTSD, without contemplating bringing all of it home.

Perhaps instead Americans will react to a casualty list of aeronautic losses, maybe for reasons of pure economics. How many helicopters and jets we are losing adds to the federal deficit. But the losses of big equipment might offer the same decision making information we glean from the higher value chess pieces. Rooks and knights represent offensive capability. Hopes for victory or a draw hinge on which of those you have left. No one capitulates based on a count of their pawns. The cumulative tallies will reflect which way the tide is going. Military drones may be worth zero lives, but their destruction will signal an insurgence indomitable.

Sept 11 – America Reaps What It Sows!

A post-911 perspective by Black Liberation Army prisoner of war Jalil Muntaqim.

U.S. International Warfare Initiates World War III Human Rights During Wartime
By Jalil A. Muntaqim

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Americans have displayed their true colors of jingoism, a militaristic spirit of nationalism. Similarly, it was witnessed how the people of Iraq rallied in support of their President, Saddam Hussein, after the U.S. bombed to death 250,000 Iraqis, and continued devastation of that country with collateral damage of 1 million dead women and children. Hence, people rallying in support of their government and representatives is a common phenomenon when a country is attacked by an outsider. The U.S. has been foremost in the world extending foreign policy of free-market economy, to the extent of undermining other countries cultures and ideologies expressed as their way of life. Such conflicts inevitably positions the U.S. as the centerpiece, the bulls-eye for international political dissent, as indicated by demonstrations against the U.S. controlled IMF, WTO and World Bank conferences. The attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon did not occur in a vacuum. The people that carried out the attacks were not blind followers or robots with an irrational hatred of the U.S. peoples. Rather, this attack was part of an overall blowback to U.S. imperialist policy in support of zionist Israel and opposition to fundamentalist Islam.

There are essentially three primary world ideologies or world views: the capitalist free-market economy/democracy; the socialist production economy; and Islamic theocratic government, of which has been in competition for many decades. However, in the last 20 years the socialist economies has been severely subverted and co-opted by free-market economies, the ideals of American style democracy. This isolated, for the most part, Islamic theocratic ideology and system of government as the principle target of the U.S. in its quest for world hegemony. This reality of competing world views and economies is further complicated due to religious underpinning of beliefs that motivates actions, especially as they are expressed by U.S. and Western European christianity and Israel zionist judaism in opposition to Islam. From the struggles of the Crusades to the present confrontation, the struggle for ideological supremacy reigns, as the faithful continue to proselytize in the name of the Supreme Being.

When geopolitics are combined with religious fervor in the character of nationalist identity and patriotism, rational and logical thinking is shoved aside as matters of the moment takes historical precedents. It has often been said that “Truth Crush to the Earth Will Rise Again”. Since truth is relative to ones belief, can it be safely said that America has reaped what it has sowed? The American truth of capitalist christian democracy and its imperialist hegemonic aspirations has crushed both socialist and Islamic world views. It has extended its avaricious tentacles as the world police and economic harbinger of all that is beneficent, in stark denial of its history as a purveyor of genocides, slavery and colonial violence.

The U.S. was the first to use biological-germ warfare on people when it distributed blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans; it has refused to apologize for Afrikan slavery acknowledging it engaged in a crime against humanity requiring reparations; it is the first and only country to use the atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and intern thousands of Japanese and Italians in this country; it used carpet bombing and defoliates against the peoples of Vietnam; it has initiated embargoes, coup d’etats and assassinations against those it opposes, while propping-up right-wing military dictators; as well as continued military bombing of Vieques. In essence, the U.S. governments hegemonic goals has created the ire of millions of people throughout the world. While domestically, racial profiling, police killing and mass incarceration of Black and Brown people has eroded patriotic sentiments in opposition to white supremacy.

As America weeps and laments its loss, the public find itself joining the torn ranks of those whose heartaches beat opposing U.S. greed and international profiteering. The American public acquiesce to U.S. international folly has cause them to feel the economic pains of those who live daily in poverty. Indeed, Americans should brace for years of economic uncertainty, where the American ideal of freedom and liberty will resemble plight of those who live under the right-wing dictatorships the U.S. has supported. The tyranny suffered by others in the world as a result of U.S. imperialism, has come full circle to visit this country with the wrath of the U.S. own mechanization. Since the U.S. taught and trained right-wing military dictators in the School of the Americas, including the CIA training of Osama bin Laden in the Afghanistan proxy war against the Russians, it will be this same kind of terrorist activist that will be unleashed on American soil, as El-Hajj Malik Shabazz stated after the assassination of John Kennedy, a matter of the chicken coming home to roost. Therefore, American civil liberties and human rights are being garrotted by the yoke of the right-wing in the name of national security. The legalization of U.S. fascism was initiated with the war against political dissent (Cointelpro); the war against organized crime (RICO laws); the war against illegal drugs (plethora of drug laws) and now culminating in the war against terrorism with the American Joint Anti-Terrorist Taskforce and Office of Home Security, further extending police, FBI and CIA powers to undermine domestic civil liberties and human rights.

The U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, recently stated that the U.S. need to create a new language in defining how to combat terrorism. This Orwellian propaganda in the media espouses the U.S. is venturing in a new type of warfare to defend the American way of life. However, what this double-speak propagates as a long-term and sustained initiative against terrorism is essentially a way of embellishing and enlarging U.S. counter-insurgency activity it has been engaged in since the advent of the Green Berets, Rangers, Delta Force and Navy Seals. The U.S. has been involved in counter-insurgency activity in Afrika, Latin America and Asia for decades. But due to the September 11, 2001, attack on U.S. soil, the government has seized the opportunity to offensively pursue left-wing revolutionaries and Muslim insurgents throughout the world. This U.S. military action extends and substantiates its position as the international police.

Since the establishment of the Trilateral Commission that initiated the process for the development of one world government, the U.S. has broaden its capacity to impose and enforce its will on oppressed peoples globally. The FBI and CIA has been operating in Europe, Afrika, Asia and Latin America establishing the long arm of U.S. law and order. Its bases of operations have conducted surveillance, investigations to arrest, prosecute or neutralize left-wing revolutionaries or Muslim insurgents. As the U.S. consolidates its political and economic influence throughout the world, it will seek to protect its overall hegemonic imperialist goals. After the Gulf War, and the air (bombing) campaign in Yugoslavia, the U.S. has employed its military might to ensure its foreign policy are achieved.

Because NATO has evolved into a European military entity that Russia is seeking to join, today, the U.S. has positioned itself beyond the mission of NATO. The U.S. now concentrates its military might in opposing Islamic countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Philippines, etc.) and those the U.S. deem as rogue nations (North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.). The new military initiatives will be directed to towards Southeast Asia as the secondary target, as it continues to direct the Middle East conflict to preserve its oil investments and zionist interest. As the U.S. expand its imperialist military mission, as seen with committing military troops in Uzbekistan to also protect oil interest in the Caspian Sea, it has sought to redefine itself by targeting what it identify as the terrorist thereat wherever in the world it might exist. Hence, with the employment of conventional warfare combined with counter-insurgency tactical activities, the U.S. has pronounced itself as the military guardian of the world.

Although, the U.S. states its actions are in its self-interest, in terms of what is euphemistically defined as defending the free world, the truth of the matter is this action is a prelude to evolving one world government with the U.S. as its governing authority. Once the Peoples Republic of China becomes a full member of the WTO, and North Korea and Vietnam has been compromised, with Russia becoming an ally of NATO, the U.S. political-military influence in the world will be consolidated. The U.S. geopolitical strategy is not confined to the present crisis in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack and targeting Osama bin Laden as the world’s nemesis. Rather, the U.S. strategy is to preserve its capacity to establish one world government as originally envisioned by the Trilateral Commission.

Nonetheless, there are some serious obstacles to this hegemonic goal, of which the world of fundamentalist Islam has become the principle target. Here, it should be noted that Islam condemns suicide or the mass killings of women, children and non-combatant males. Yet, the U.S., Israel, western Europe, Russia, India and China all view Islam as the enemy. Although, there are over 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, the current alliance of economic interest headed by the U.S., are united to vanquish what they consider the growing menace of fundamentalist Islam. It is with this understanding of U.S. geopolitics one is able to comprehend why the U.S. has redefine its military mission, as opposition to globalization and U.S. imperialism metamorph into a political struggle without borders or territorial imperatives.

The ideological struggle between capitalist free-market economy and Islamic theocratic determinates has exploded into an international conflagration of insurgency with the potential of initiating World War III. The Islamic fundamentalist movements throughout the world has the potential to test the U.S. military, political and economic resolve as the world’s leader and authority of an one world government. With over 1.2 billion adherents, Islam has become a formidable foe to contend with for ideological supremacy in the world’s geopolitics. Even without discussing the religious (moral and ethics) aspects that motivates the geopolitics of Islam in opposition to U.S. imperialist hegemony, the call for Jihad/Holy War against the U.S. presents a serious threat that could precipitate WW-III. Therefore, the U.S. find it necessary to redefine its military mission, develop new language to codify warfare and legitimize its international political and economic purpose. Yet, many of the world’s oppressed peoples’ have already experienced U.S. military counter-insurgency tactics (Ethiopia, Somalia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Congo, etc.), including parts of the Islamic world. No matter how or why the U.S. attempts to persuade Americans that it is entering a new type of warfare, in reality it is more of the same, only extending the military arena to further protect its authority to establish one world government.

However, the U.S. is not the homogeneous country that people are deluded into believing exist. Rather, the U.S. has been held together due its ability to exploit the world’s resources and distribute (unequally) the profits amongst its citizens with its culture of conspicuous consumption. But, the recent attack on the U.S., and its aftermath may very well lead to the untangling and unraveling of the U.S. fabric as has been witnessed with the USSR and Yugoslavia. In understanding this true history of U.S. imperialism, outside and within its borders, essentially tells a story of why U.S. imperialism has been and will continue to be attacked.

Ultimately, the U.S. will eventually find itself at war with itself, as the ideology of a free democratic society will be found to be a big lie. This is especially disconcerting as greater restrictions on civil and human rights are made into law eroding the First and Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As during the Vietnam conflict, internal contradictions of racism, poverty and inequality will be exacerbated as a result of the U.S. military campaign and domestic undermining of civil and human rights. It is expected that strife in America will eventually become violent dissolving any semblance of the illusion of America the Beautiful. In anticipation of U.S. progressive activist opposing this claimed war against terrorism, the federal government will pass new laws to severely restrict protest, demonstrations and dissent. In the ’60s, U.S. progressive activists evolved the slogan “Bring the War Home!” – the question is what will be the slogan this time, now that the war has been brought home?

Free the Land!!